by Warren Adler
“So she did abandon the baby?” The woman grew silent. “Finally. She should never have let it be born.” She appeared to be saying more to herself, not for his ears.
“Why are you looking for her?” she asked.
He had dreaded the question, remembering his explanation to his father: She wanted me to go, Dad. It seemed, suddenly, shallow, incomplete. Was it really something that his mother had urged? Or something he demanded of himself? He groped for a believable answer.
“It’s something I felt I had to do… to understand the…” He felt himself stumbling. “Mother never… Not until she was about to die. Suddenly, a link.” He was growing irritated with himself. The old woman seemed embarrassed by the explanation. She nodded and looked away.
“I think about Farrah,” she said. She was softer now, confirming Si’s suspicion about her. “It was Vivanti. He made me send her away.” A note of guilt intruded. “Then, later, I saw her picture and the baby. The newspaper story.” She looked up and confronted him sharply. “She told you nothing? Nothing?”
Si looked at Abdel. Newspaper story? They exchanged puzzled glances.
“Then you have no idea who Isis’s father was?”
He shook his head.
“Worse,” he said. “There seem to be others looking for Isis as well. Some shadowy figure. A man named Zakki.” The name made a strong impression on her.
“That one.”
“You know him?” He thought of the old woman at the City of the Dead. She had spoke of a man named Zakki as well.
Abdel stirred beside him. A wave of fear washed over him.
“He came once. Also looking for Isis. We knew who he was. He had been Farouk’s chauffeur, a mean bastard. Vivanti didn’t know where Isis was. How would he know, the dirty dago? Zakki beat him, cut him all over. It took him months to recover. But he didn’t know.”
“When was that?”
She thought for a moment. “Sixty-seven. I always remember. Vivanti died in sixty-eight.”
“But why? Did he say why?”
She shook her head.
“I have never seen a greater rage.” She sighed. “Vivanti was never the same.” Behind the mask of enmity for her dead husband, Si saw her loneliness.
“He was her father?” Si asked.
“Vivanti?”
“That toad. Of course not.”
“And Zakki?”
The woman got up from the chair and went to a shelf piled high with papers. Snapping open an eyeglass case, she carefully put on her glasses and began to rummage through the papers, stirring ancient dust.
“Zakki is still searching for her,” Si said. The woman ignored him, continuing to carefully sift through the papers, occasionally holding one to the sparse light. They watched her. From time to time she mumbled something incoherently.
After a while, she came back to the chair and sat down, spreading a yellowed clipping on her lap, pressing out its folds. Then she handed it to him. Abdel came closer while they read it.
“King Farouk…” He felt his throat constrict and his lungs seemed to close. “Teenage mistress.” The words swam before his eyes. “My god.” He could not recognize the young woman who stared out from the badly faded clipping. Some of the type had been obliterated, leaving large gaps in the story. “I can’t believe it.”
“You think I could believe it. That’s why I must have kept it all these years.”
He was totally confused. Was this his mother? Surely not the woman he had known. The face of the baby was featureless.
Mrs. Vivanti seemed to observe him closely, then rose and moved to a cupboard, taking out a bottle of Scotch and a tumbler, which she half filled, handing it to him. He drank it greedily, feeling the liquid burn, jolting him.
“I had no idea,” he whispered. Images of his mother crowded in on him, an indistinguishable jumble. Then the wall of the musty room seemed to compress, while the woman’s body enlarged and he felt the beginning of some awesome feeling of strangulation. Suddenly, he stood up and slowly the feeling went away. The woman watched him.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” she said.
“I did,” he croaked. “This is my mother. I hadn’t a clue.” He cleared his throat. “Then where is my sister?”
The woman shrugged.
“And the man, Zakki. Did he ever find her?”
“The mother or the baby?” the woman asked, her mind obviously still shrewd and alert. She shrugged her answer and remained silent.
“Can I keep this?” he managed to say. The woman nodded assent. Although he tried valiantly to control his emotions, he could not. He felt a sob rise in his chest. I have got to get out of here, quickly, he told himself, moving toward the door, Abdel beside him. Questions choked themselves in his brain, like flames sputtering into life, then extinguishing themselves like trick candles. He felt slightly dizzy, nauseous.
He held up the clipping which shook in his hand. “My mother…” he began, then could no longer speak.
“Your mother? Crazy. She was beauty. That I will say.”
“Thank you so much,” Si croaked, barely able to speak.
“Go. Go. Go find your little princess.”
“Princess?”
Outside again, he headed for the beach. It was pitch dark. He needed to clear his mind. Abdel said nothing. He wondered if she understood. My sister is a princess, he thought.
For a long time, he sat cross-legged at the surf’s edge, watching the ocean’s eternal rhythm, spangled by the million chips of light from the canopy of stars. The vastness seemed appropriate to his own state of mind. He was, after all, a minuscule grain of matter in the infinite cosmos. Why hadn’t his mother told him about Farouk? Why had she kept such a secret until the end? Shame? Fear? That was a mystery that he would never solve.
He lay back, resting his head on his arms, and looked up at the flickering sky. Losing himself in its infinity soothed him. What was he looking for, he asked, wondering if it was a question directed at God or himself. God? Allah? Knowledge beyond comprehension?
Abdel squatted beside him. Suddenly he felt the need to touch something alive. He put his arm around her. She leaned against him.
“It’s coming too fast,” he said. “I can’t grasp it. My view of her is so different. Like she was another person.” He paused, shivering, holding Abdel closer. “She was my mother. How could I not know my own mother? And that article. So… so damned tawdry, a filthy little scandal. Maybe she just had to get away from here. Maybe the embarrassment… Yet it seems so out of character. Not the woman who bore me and loved me. Who was she really?”
Abdel shivered and leaned against him for warmth.
“Why did she tell me? She could have died with it all hidden. That’s the enigma…” He sat for a long time, pondering the relentless flow of the ocean’s tide. “Maybe you were right, what good will it do to stir up old ashes?”
He released her and lay supine, watching the stars.
“It’s too late,” he muttered. “I’ve already bit the damned apple. I must see this to the end. I need to know. Now more than ever. Is she alive?”
He closed his eyes, feeling his fatigue. His energy dissipated, he slipped into sleep. It seemed his only defense.
Chapter Twenty-Three
He awoke at dawn. A sliver of light on the eastern horizon lit up the sea. He apparently had turned in his sleep into the fetal position, and he was surprised to find that Abdel was stretched along his back, her arm wrapped around his midsection. Removing it gently, he rose and walked to the sea’s edge. The tide had receded. He brought his toilet kit from the stuffed shirt, lathered up and shaved by touch, then brushed his teeth with the salt water. He felt clean and fresh.
When he turned, Abdel was sitting up, rubbing her eyes, and the top arc of the sun was poking above the horizon. In the distance, he could
hear the muezzin’s call to prayer. Alexandria was stirring.
Abdel stood up and walked to the sea’s edge, her graceful body silhouetted against the light, looking like a long-stemmed flower, caught in a puff of breeze. Watching her stirred memories of last night’s revelations. People were arriving at the beach, their presence jarring him back to reality.
He knew he had to go back to Mrs. Vivanti. He reached into his pocket and unfolded the faded clipping that the woman had given him. He read it again with disbelief then noted the byline, Arthur Thompson, and the name of the newspaper, Al Akhbar. Perhaps this fellow, Thompson, was still around? It annoyed him that he had let his emotions rule his mind last night. He wanted the woman to empty her mind of everything she had known about his mother and sister. He felt the depths of his inexperience. Confrontations required better reflexes. Mrs. Vivanti could have offered insights, more clues.
Abdel came closer to him. Her hair was damp and the water had curled it. Watching her broke the tension and he smiled.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked.
“That outfit,” he said. She smoothed her clothes. His comment had triggered her vanity. “We’ll have to get you some decent clothes.” He put his hands in his pocket, withdrew his packet of traveler’s checks and counted them.
“You spent too much last night,” she scolded. “Drinking.”
“At least the hotel was the right price,” he said, waving his arm to take in the beach. Others, too, had used the beach for the same purposes and were stirring now. Not far, a band of naked children were already squealing in the surf and he could see joggers moving in the distance.
On the Corniche, they bought a round loaf of bread from a vendor and washed it down with a cup of tea in a tiny café that had just opened. Abdel was unusually quiet, brooding. He tried to josh her into better spirits. Her response was enigmatic.
“If she’s the daughter of a king, that makes her a princess.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” he lied. The fact of her paternity had considerably altered Isis’s image in his mind. “A lot of good it did.” It was like a painting being slowly filled in by a brush from an unknown hand.
The information eruption had subsided and he was able now to pick among the debris. His mother had been a belly dancer, mistress to a king, the subject of a scandal. But the idea of the anarchic term did not amuse him. Had his mother been a whore? The generational gap widened. A whore? What was that? So Zakki had been Farouk’s chauffeur. He suddenly recalled the danger, remembering, too, what Madame Vivanti had said about Zakki beating up her husband. He thought, too, of the dead woman at the City of the Dead.
“I hadn’t expected this,” he said, shaking his head.
“Nor I,” Abdel whispered, looking despairingly into the teacup.
“You can get off the train anytime you want,” he said, annoyed now with her gloom.
He got up, paid for the tea, and stormed off. Abdel, hesitating at first, quickly caught up with him.
They passed through the narrow streets in the direction of the woman’s flat. His movements were deliberately slow, as his mind catalogued the questions he would ask. Merchants were just opening their stalls. A gnarled little man was carrying out a rack of skirts and blouses. He suddenly felt guilty about Abdel.
“Let’s get you something that fits right,” he said. She frowned, but he rifled through the racks, measuring clothing against her body. Picking out a skirt and a white blouse, he gave them to her. The gnarled man pointed to the back. Abdel went behind a curtain, clutching the clothing. While Si waited, he poked around the stalls, finally buying her a cheap pendant, a piece of coral on a chain, bargaining with the man. It made him feel good to get the price down to half what the man was asking.
“I’m half Arab,” he told the man, smiling.
The clothes he had picked out for her fit her surprisingly well, clinging to her youthful but now visible curves. Looking at her approvingly, he made her turn around and fastened the chain on the back of her neck. When she felt it, her eyes filled with tears.
“We don’t need your blubbering,” he said. “And don’t look so damned grateful. A simple thank-you will do.”
She nodded, unable to speak.
“At least you look like a girl now.”
There is no mistaking that, he thought. An errant awareness of her sexuality intruded on his consciousness, but he dismissed it. She’s just a kid.
He picked up speed. She hurried beside him, continuing to finger the coral pendant.
He had forgotten the address, and they made a number of false turns, although he regained the direction by recognizing a familiar sight here and there. He hadn’t realized he had been so subconsciously alert. Finally, he was sure that he was on the right street and he hurried toward where he knew the house would be.
Even as he smelled the first whiff of acrid smoke, he knew what it was. A group of curious onlookers had clustered around the still smoking ruin. He did not have to ask what had happened.
“We’re the kiss of death,” he murmured, stopping briefly, then turning. Abdel seemed rooted to the spot, her eyes searching the crowd.
“How the hell could they know?” he said.
“They know,” Abdel responded, her voice quivering.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Zakki sat alone on the terrace, enveloped in darkness. The air was heavily perfumed by the moist verdancy. His power of hearing was a vast sensor. He listened, letting the sounds engulf him. He heard the insects pursuing their calamitous existence, the heartbeat of the roosting birds, the inchoate whelp of the desert puppy, the relentless tide of water emptying out of Africa. When he concentrated, he was sure he could hear the tremulous hum of the bottom fish in their river nests.
He rarely slept. It was a habit he had picked up when he had worked for Farouk. Once, the monarch’s restlessness had been an enigma. Then Zakki had finally understood. There was no terror like the terror of dreams. And no comfort greater than the comfort of greed. Beyond that was the snake pit.
Triggered by the thought, he felt the cobra of agony stir inside of him again, the cobra of agony, a scaled, slithering cold-blooded serpent, coiling again around the soft center of himself. Nothing, he knew, would ever satisfy that. Nothing but Isis.
Please, soon, he screamed inside of himself, feeling the beast squeeze its warning. Soon!
The young man’s arrival had quickened the beast’s hunger. Not that he had ever given up, but the scent had simply gotten colder. Then the boy had come. Farrah’s boy!
He raised his bulk from the chaise and moved to the edge of the terrace. Between the palm trees, he could see the tiny lights that edged the outer wall of the villa. Men guarded the compound day and night, oblivious to the central truth that the enemy was inside, had crawled from the snake pit, into him, through the wound.
He moved back to his chaise. Next to it was a small table filled with cakes and sweets, an exact replica of the foods on which his old boss had gorged. His body had become a gelatinous mass, a balloon of oily flesh, as if all the remaining glands and ducts were discharging inside of him. Puddles of fat rolled over his bull neck, dripping downward, like melted wax, over his belly and thighs.
So he had thrown yet more bodies into the pit. He would throw more, a thousand, a hundred thousand, to reach Isis. The young man’s sudden presence was a miracle, the miracle he had prayed for. Allah would guide him. He had become a beacon. He had only to track its beam. He had lost the mother forever. But it was the child that had become his obsession, Farrah’s child.
Breathing deeply, he felt the faulty pumping of his overburdened heart. He was certain that it could endure the rigors of the remaining journey. Hadn’t he, after all, come to know the truth of Allah’s grand design, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, pain for pain?
He was certain, too, that Farouk had metamorphosed his tissues, in the
fat-clogged cells, in the flat bald head of the cobra, fueling the brain that directed his agony. That, too, would die with Isis’s pain.
He heard the door open and Ahmed’s whispering tread as he moved across the terrace. In the dark, the black Nubian was as featureless as smooth onyx. Zakki lifted his head and waited for the soft voice to begin.
“The young man…” he cleared his throat lightly. “And the other one are on the Luxor train. We have people on the train and waiting at Luxor.”
The news did not startle him, although earlier he had been puzzled by the youth’s actions. He had gone to the offices of Al Akhbar, the newspaper, then to Cairo University. At the paper, the boy had talked with an old copy editor. That, Zakki decided, had been a logical deduction. His men had extracted from the Vivanti woman that she had given Kelly the clipping of Farrah’s story. So he had certainly tried to contact… he had to dig deep in his memory for the name of the man he had murdered. Thompson. But he was puzzled why the youth had proceeded to the university, where he talked with the head of the Department of Antiquities.
“We can find out,” Ahmed had said, responding to his query.
Zakki had decided against that for the time being, although he filed away the names of the people in his mind.
“No need for that, Ahmed,” he had replied, “as long as we follow the young man.” Only later, when it was over, would he retrace his steps. Everyone in the chain must be swept away. Everyone!
When Ahmed had gone, he lay back on the chaise and sipped mineral water. He had only to be patient. He praised himself for having learned this trait. It buttressed his faith in his instincts. Farrah’s boy, he knew, would lead him to Isis.
At first, he had denied this instinct. But at each stage in his life, he had looked back and seen the moving finger of fate.
As a boy, watching the young king in the open carriage, sharing the joy and tumult with a million ecstatic Cairenes, he knew that some day their destinies would be intertwined. He had, from that moment, been obsessed with the idea of one day being in the presence of the king, to serve him, to love him. Hadn’t destiny put his father’s donkey cart in the path of the young king’s speeding sports car?
